


A New Voice to Quiet the Screams

by SerenLyall



Series: Star Wars Tumblr Prompts [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: (though it's mild. especially for me), Gen, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-02
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2019-02-26 15:05:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13238274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerenLyall/pseuds/SerenLyall
Summary: Leia on the Death Star.





	A New Voice to Quiet the Screams

**Author's Note:**

> "Still doing star wars prompts? If so, something with Leia and her time on the death star woud rock -- maybe reaction to getting rescued by Han and Luke? I know you've written stuff on it before, but it's AWESOME and more would be great! -anonymous"

She screams, and Vader tears through her thoughts and memories and dreams, leaving tattered shreds in his wake. She vomits, and a Stormtrooper kicks her in the stomach. She spits on Vader’s boots, and he forces the memory into her head of having her tongue ripped out.

And then he is gone, and all is quiet, calm, still, and she is left with only the beat of her heart and her shivers from the cold and the sour taste of bile on her tongue. She aches, and burns, and throbs from head to toe, and she forgets what it was to not be afraid.

Then hands–Stormtroopers’, Vader’s–and Tarkin’s high voice damning her to an end far more painful than death. The explosion that signals her wished-for death leaves halos behind her eyes, and the bridge of the Death Star turns to shadow and ash in her vision. She does not feel as she is lifted to her feet and pushed down corridors and down lifts. There is the hiss of a door opening, and then her cell yawns before her and she is left alone to her ghosts.

She sleeps. And she dreams of a boy with sandy hair, and a house by a lake on a planet beautiful enough to make her cry.

When she wakes, it is to the sound of her door opening again. She lifts herself up on an elbow, and stares down the Stormtrooper standing in the door. She spits a barb at his boots, and waits for the blow or curse that is sure to come.

Instead he says, surprised, “Oh!” and pulls his helmet off. And there, standing in the door to her cell, is a sandy-haired boy with the bluest eyes she has ever seen. “I’m here to rescue you,” he says, and steps back, opening the doorway to her freedom.

They escape–her, and the sandy-haired boy, and another man that she thinks she hates but secretly doesn’t, and a Wookiee–and there is foul-smelling water and walls that close in on them and corridors and corridors and corridors of metal walls and metal floors and metal-clad men who shoot at them. But they escape, and then they are free, the vast emptiness of space cradling them in her vaults of shadow. 

And she hurts–bruises, and abrasions, and her head still aching with the pain of a needle behind her eyes: Vader’s last gift to her–and she is empty and hollow and filled with ghosts.

“I’m sorry,” the sandy-haired, blue-eyed boy says. His name is Luke, and she already loves him, in spite of herself and the echo of the screams she imagined she heard. “I wish we could have gotten there sooner.”

It wouldn’t have mattered, she doesn’t tell him.

He opens his arms, and she falls into them, and he holds her tightly in the dark hallway of the ship. Han–the man she has already found she cannot hate–is asleep in his bunk, and Chewie–the Wookiee she already respects–is in the cockpit.

“I’m sorry,” Luke says again. And she knows he understands, for he too lost his whole world, for all that it was smaller than her own.

At least we have each other, she wants to tell him, though she does not know why. For, though she has lost everything, in him it feels as if she has found something precious.

And that, maybe, will be enough to heal the pain still whispering through her body, and will begin to fill the emptiness in her soul that a whole world used to fill.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked it, consider leaving a review!


End file.
